Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Well, after having this set up, I wanted to be able switch resolutions (the screen is really tiny, and it drops the frame-rate of games rather significantly) I tried all of the standard xorg.conf configuration, addmode, newmode, all of that. But nothing worked.

Today, I stumbled on a solution: xrandr's --scale option. This allows you to scale that screen to almost any resolution you want.

for example:

xrandr -q

(this returns certain names e.g. mine is DP-2. Another is HDMI-0. One will say "connected" and that's the one you need.

xrandr --output DP-2 --scale .5x.5

This scales it to a 1440x900 resolution.

One thing to note. Sometimes trying to go from one scaled resolution to another will fail with an error. Don't panic: just change the scale back to 1x1, and the next scale you choose will work. The scaling numbers don't have to be simple: I managed to get ~1650x1050 by putting the scale value as .5729x.5729.

EDIT: I found a way to fix the trackpad settings.
I followed this advice here: uselessuseofcat.com/?p=74ls,
but it didn't quite help with the trackpad's tap-click.
I then found this package: gpointing-device-settings

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

This installs a utility that is launched by running
gpointing-device-settings
in the terminal.

This is a graphical configuration for your trackpad, so you should be able to customize your mouse however you want.